My thoughts on the Electoral College
So. Election Day was yesterday, and Donald Trump won enough electoral votes to win the presidency, with a total of 279. However. 200,000 more people voted for Hillary Clinton, therefore she won the popular vote. Unfortunately, the popular vote doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things, and here's why. The Electoral College sucks. Wait, you want me to elaborate? Alright. Here we go. I've watched two videos on this topic since yesterday. The first one is by Craig "WheezyWaiter" Benzine. He states that originally, coming into this video, he thought the Electoral College was stupid, because a vote in Wyoming counts more than a vote in California. He then goes on and says that he did some research, like good YouTubers do when making videos, and he found an article that pointed out that if the Electoral College didn't exist, in 2012, Mitt Romney could have campaigned solely in the South and won the popular vote, which is a fine point against the Electoral College existing. Craig does acknowledge that neither system is perfect, so we're kind of stuck for the time being. However, I also watched a video from CGP Grey this morning (it's from 2011, but whatever), and he makes loads of even more valid points that put into perspective why this is a bad system. Like, really bad. First off, he points out that states like Ohio, New York, Texas, and California don't get as many electoral votes as they should proportional to their population. Ohio, for example, mathematically should get 20 electoral votes based on their population, but they only get 18. Conversely, Rhode Island, mathematically, should get 2 electoral votes, but they get 4. While I do agree with this point for the most part, regardless of math, Rhode Island, and every other state for that matter, is guaranteed 3 votes, one for each of their two senators, and one for however many representatives they have in the House of Representatives. To solve this problem, we could just have more people in the House of Representatives so that the populations of the states would more accurately be represented, because by CGP Grey's logic, Rhode Island wouldn't have any representatives in the House at all, which would also go for smaller states population-wise like Alaska and Wyoming. Ok, so... He addresses that in the video, but... I still felt like saying it. Shush mate. Moving on. So then he shows a map which shows that states like Arizona's votes count less than those of Idaho, for example. How would you like to live in California then to realize that Wyoming's votes count more? His next point is that the Electoral College means that candidates can focus more on the bigger states and pay less attention to the smaller ones, since the bigger states get more electoral votes. In the last 2 months of the 2008 election, the two candidates spent more than half their time and spent more than half of their money campaigning in a total of four states, these being Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Virginia. This is because the election is winner-take-all. If you get 50.1% of the popular votes in, say, Florida, you get 100% of their 29 electoral votes. So no matter how close it is, if you get less than 50% of the vote, tough luck. Then he goes on and addresses the question of what would happen if this system were abolished and the candidates spent all their time campaigning in big cities. This isn't an issue at all. The top 10 most populous cities account for 7.9% of the country's population. Not too significant if that's where you spend all your time campaigning. Even the top 100 cities don't even count for 20% of the country's population. So spending your time in the biggest cities would be a waste of time. Now this is where the Electoral College falls apart. It is mathematically possible to become president under this system of election with only 22% of the electoral votes. Just watch the video down below to see how this is possible. Sure, this is pretty situational, but it proves the point well nonetheless. If you can win with less than a quarter of the votes in the election, you have a ludicrously broken system. SO MUCH FOR DEMOCRACY! This isn't even the first time someone has won the popular vote but ultimately lost the election. In 1876, 1888, and 2000 (and now 2016, but this video was made in 2011 so that wasn't included (don't worry, he made an update video this morning.)), the same thing has happened. This accounts for 7% of the elections in history. Seven. Percent. How would you like it if the umpires in baseball intentionally made the wrong call on a play 7% of the time? That would undoubtedly result in the standings being shaken up quite a bit, considering how many pitches are thrown and how many outs are made per game. This would result in about 17 wrong calls per game for no reason at all. So if they don't do it for baseball, why in the presidential election? To be honest, I'm surprised Hillary isn't ranting nonstop about how this system should be abolished. Category:Politics Category:Stuff Category:Dumb Category:Thoughts Category:Videos Category:Donald Trump